The use of bathing caps is often prescribed in swimming pools for cleaniness and hygienic reasons, moreover their use in free waters is desirable to protect the hair, which, because of its nature, retains salts and other impurities present in the water, thus requiring far too frequent shampooing which becomes very harsh on the hair.
The bathing caps commonly available, on the other hand, are troublesome to use because, since they rely solely on the stretching of the elastic material which they are made from, to afford tightness around the head, their use is often devastating for hair-dos. Even prescinding from aesthetic consequences, the act of arranging the cap over large shocks of hair is difficult and often accompanied by painful discomfort, specially when trying to insert the last recalcitrant locks under the shelter of the cap.
There have been different suggestions in the past to provide bathing caps more comforable to use, which made use of various types of fastening means, however, these proposals did not find acceptance because either they were unpractical or they proposed cumbersome and expensive fastening means, hardly incorporable in the rubber caps commonly produced.
For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 2,465,998 it is described a bathing cap having one or more zippers to draw segments of the cap together over a sealing web.
The bathing cap described in U.S. Pat. No. 1,926,937 uses straps and a buckle to tighten the rim.
Again the headgear described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,710,393 in its embodiment depicted in FIG. 12 describes the use of a zipper and of a belt to close fit the cap over the head of the wearer.